Former Carolina Chocolate Drop Dom Flemons gets into the cowboy way

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

Friday

Nov 23, 2018 at 12:01 AMNov 24, 2018 at 11:03 AM

The musical experiences and resulting career of Dom Flemons have been all over the place, from what he was listening to as a kid to the range of instruments he’s learned to play to a long run as a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops right up to his current phase as a solo artist. Which is how he’ll be doing a show, featuring songs from his newest recording, “Black Cowboys,” at Club Passim on Nov. 25.

Reached by phone at his home in Silver Springs, MD, Flemons, 36, who grew up in Phoenix, said he started with drums and percussion, dating back to his grade school days. Fascinated by a PBS documentary on the history of rock ’n’ roll when he was in junior high school, he became interested in “everything from Louis Jordan and Muddy Waters all the way through Elvis and Carl Perkins and Fats Domino. One episode was on the folk revival of the ’60s and how it transformed into the Summer of Love in California, so that got me listening to the stuff from the Monterey Pop Festival.”

He began playing guitar and then harmonica when he was about 16, his musical interests led him into early New Orleans jazz, and before long he was playing the banjo. By the time Flemons was earning his English degree at Northern Arizona University, he was regularly playing out, either in coffeehouses or busking on street corners, accompanying himself on guitar, coming up as a folk act with a penchant for interpreting old-time songs, often tossing in a couple of originals.

Flemons’ life would take a dramatic change – one that set him on the course of becoming a professional musician – when, in 2005, he headed east and settled down in Durham, North Carolina, where he would soon form the folkie, old-timey Carolina Chocolate Drops with Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson. But something had happened a few years earlier, that would put him on the road he still travels.

“I happened to see Dave Van Ronk in Phoenix in 2002, six or seven months before he passed,” said Flemons. “That changed my whole outlook in terms of thinking about just playing music to playing the music and telling a story, whether it’s a historical artifact or a personal anecdote. That’s what I took away from that Van Ronk show and something I still do in my shows now.”

Between the songs at Chocolate Drops performances, Flemons would tell plenty of stories about those songs. The band achieved international acclaim and won a Traditional Folk Album Grammy for their 2011 release “Genuine Negro Jig.” But after nine years with the group, it was time for Flemons to strike out on his own. He admitted that he was initially just a tad nervous.

“When you leave a group that’s successful, that’s always a crap shoot,” he said. “I’d seen what happened with the Temptations. [Lead singer] David Ruffin left the group, jumped out, wanted to be his own man, but he just sunk. So, the way I tried to avoid a story like that was to create a persona of the American Songster. A songster played a variety of material, and since that’s what I did, too – being a country singer and a blues singer – that described what I did more than just being a folk singer.”

His 2014 album “Prospect Hill” covered all sorts of old-timey folkie terrain, while “Black Cowboys” is more focused on, as the title suggests, cowboy songs.

“I’ve always been a fan of cowboy music, although I’ve never performed it exclusively,” said Flemons. “But I read the book “The Negro Cowboys” by Philip Durham, and then I listened to the traditional anthology album ‘Black Texicans.’ That’s when I started to think about how I wanted to craft the story black cowboys. I grabbed every cowboy album I had and tried to find the songs that I felt told the best story.”

Flemons may be playing and telling those stories alone on the Club Passim stage, but there will plenty of instruments to keep him company.

“I’ll have two guitars, one in standard tuning and one in open tuning,” he said. “I’ll also be bringing my harmonicas, my four-string banjo, a gourd banjo, my rhythm bones, and my quills.”

And he promises that the show’s scope will go far beyond just what’s on the new album.

“It presents kind of an overview of everything I’ve done,” he said. “So, fans of the Chocolate Drops will get some old-time music, like they heard in the group. I also include songs from ‘Prospect Hill’ and, of course, ‘Black cowboys,’ and some of the stuff from my earlier two records that are out of print. It’s a nice variety of things I’ve done through my career. I think that as an individual performer, I’ve crafted a nice set that feels good.”